The Truth About Being A Writer (Hint:
You Donít Have To Be Unhappy)
Ten minutes before my agent called to
tell me sheíd sold my first novel,
I was standing in our community garden
watching a hawk murder a dove.
It was clear that this was an omen of
some kind, although I didnít know what
kind of omen it was.
That must have been the moment when my
agent received the offer for my novel,
so it was the moment when I ceased to
be an aspiring writer and became a real
writer.
I had looked forward to that
transformation my whole life.
I didnít know at the time if I was the
hawk or the dove, or what that gruesome
spectacle could mean,
and I still donít know,
because I donít know what it means to
be a writer.
In one sense, being a writer is very
much like being an aspiring writer.
I write each morning, as I did before,
and at other times I do other things,
as I also did before.
There was no transformation.
The main difference is that there are
books out there with my name on them.
Very good.
None of them are visible to me from
where Iím sitting right now,
at my desk in the attic,
and itís as if they donít exist.
And yet I devoted so much time,
in the old days, to thinking about what
it would be like to be a writer.
How different everything would be.
I imagined that I would drink all the
time and break stuff and cause trouble.
It would be a romantic and destructive
life.
But I was doing that anywayódrinking
and breaking stuff and causing
troubleóand there was nothing romantic
about it.
Maybe my real hope was that being a
writer would make it okay to behave
this way.
Being a writer would excuse my behavior.
And if I knew in my heart that one day
I would be a writer,
then my behavior was also excusable in
the present, even though the
transformation hadnít happened yet.
I donít drink anymore, or break stuff,
and I try not to cause trouble.
But if Iím not a deadbeat after all,
being a writer does mean doing a kind
of work that doesnít look much like
work, and then just sort of wandering
around in the yard,
so I do look like a deadbeat.
And being a writer also means,
for me and for almost all writers,
being poor.
I was prepared for this aspect of the
experience, but it still smarts.
I get paid small amounts at irregular
and widely-spaced intervals.
Itís like being unemployed and
sometimes winning a little bit on a
scratch ticket.
By the same token,
being a writer means struggling to pay
for healthcare.
I have to buy insurance on the
individual market, and before the ACA,
when we were living in Florida,
no one would insure meóI was a risk,
because of the recklessness of my
younger days.
Florida did not expand Medicaid either,
which meant that things were still hard
even after the ACA went into effect.
There are complexities here that I
donít understand.
I do know that our Florida insurance
cost seven times what our Massachusetts
insurance now costs,
and the coverage was worse.
What else, what else?
Being a writer is a little bit like
being insane, since I spend a lot of
time anguishing over problems that
involve people who donít exist doing
imaginary things in places that arenít
real.
I worried that being a writer would
mean never getting close to anyone,
never getting married,
never having kids.
I thought that attachments of that kind
would make it impossible to carve out
the psychological space a writer needs.
Eventually I realized that the problem
was not attachment in the abstract but
the person to whom youíre attached.
Thank God!
You shouldnít marry someone who makes
you feel trapped, whether youíre a
writer or not.
It seems obvious now.
My own partneróherself a writeróopens
the world up for me.
Something else I didnít anticipate:
Being a writer means creating a
productóa mass-produced article of
commerce.
It means trying to get people to buy
that product, although it also means
feeling guilty about trying to get
people to buy that product.
Isnít commerce unseemly?
Isnít art all about a striving after
something bigger and more meaningful?
Being a writer means having complex
feelings about other,
more successful contemporary writers.
But over and above all of that,
thereís this: I worried,
when I was an aspiring writer,
that being a real writer would mean
never being happy.
That isnít because writing had ever
made me unhappy but because I thought
it was supposed to make me unhappy.
Why?
Because Iíd heard older writers talk
endlessly about how hard writing was,
and how miserable it made them.
I have not had this experience.
Being a writer is easy.
Every day, I do the thing that I have
always wanted to doóthe thing I believe
I was put on earth to do.
And I do it in gym-shorts,
in the comfort of my own home.
Sometimes I eat a piece of toast with
jam on it.
My family crashes around downstairs.
As an MFA-friend joked at some public
event: ìBeing a writer is hard?
Being a fucking coal-miner is hard.î
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